


Live Forever in the Lights You Make

by Shriek



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Childbirth, Children, F/M, Happy Ending, Healing, Parenthood, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 14:12:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16451471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shriek/pseuds/Shriek
Summary: Time has passed, and Percy's view of castles and those who inhabit them has changed. For the better.





	Live Forever in the Lights You Make

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [There's No Room in This Hell (There's No Room in the Next)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872720), but you don't need to read it to understand this fic.
> 
> Title from The Kids From Yesterday by My Chemical Romance. (To continue the MCR title theme. You want a _really_ Perc'ahlia MCR song? Listen to The Only Hope For Me is You.)
> 
> I started this fic a little over a year ago, and it feels good to finally be finishing it, especially so close to the anniversary of Vox Machina's story ending. Percy deserves this happiness.

When their first child is born, Percy is escorted out within minutes. His hysterical babbling does absolutely nothing for Vex’s labor pains, so with a pointed look from Pike, Grog all but carries him away. This, of course, only increases Percy’s mounting anxiety, as Vex’s screams of pain sound twice as dire when he can’t be there to see that everything is going as it should, but the faint voice of rationality reminds him that he was only causing more distress with his panic.

Labor--as he logically knows but was unable to comprehend until now-- takes _hours_ , so by the time Elaina is born he has worried himself nearly to the point of exhaustion. But when he’s finally let back into the room he takes one look at his sweat-soaked and glowing wife, the tiny pink bundle in her arms, and feels like he could defeat Vecna single-handedly if the need arose. He would do anything to protect his wife and child. The first time Percy holds his daughter he weeps.

Fatherhood, unexpectedly, is a million times more nerve-wracking than childbirth. Instead of the hours long panic of Vex in pain, he has the constant terror that he will do some small thing to irreparably damage his child.

_We didn’t touch much in my family._

He holds his daughter as much as he possibly can, frequently falling asleep with her cradled to his chest.

And she _grows_. She goes from an armful of screams and excrement to a gnome sized whirlwind in what seems like no time at all, and Percy marvels at every second of it. Time seems to slow down and speed up all at once. He spends an eternity watching her sleep, yet he blinks and she’s speaking full sentences and begging for piggyback rides that she’s starting to get too heavy for. His heart breaks for the days of her chubby, grasping hands, and bursts with joy as she learns to read.

When Vex gets pregnant a second time it’s no less terrifying than the first, though the knowledge of what to expect helps a bit. He manages to stay in the room through her labor this time, and watches Percival the Fourth come into the world.

And then it’s the twins --bound to happen; it runs on both sides of the family, after all-- and then Madeline, and Vex decides five is plenty, before Percy can get any ideas about beating his parents’ record.

Their children are very much like Vex. Or perhaps very much like him. Or maybe just products of the entire long line of de Rolo boldness. They balance on parapets, make faces behind the backs of visiting dignitaries, and figure out how to make things explode with a propensity that has Percy wondering if the gods are punishing him for what his own childhood experiments must have put _his_ parents through. They’re constantly underfoot in a way he’s _sure_ he and his siblings never were, and if he can’t see at least one of them, he can usually hear them.

Not that he minds. The castle feels lived in now, rather than inhabited, which isn’t something he thought he’d ever see again. Instead of ghosts roaming the hallways, it’s children on bears. Their very existence is still a shock and a bit of a bafflement to Percy, but they can light up a room and Percy’s life with just a smile.

The ghosts still exist, of course. In dark corners, in rooms Percy and Cassandra can’t bring themselves to repurpose. In the nightmares. But there will always be dark corners in a castle, in a mind. There will always be ghosts, and spiders, and things that must be cleared away and shown the light of day once in a while.

Percy understands, for possibly the first time in his life, the inevitability of shadows and sunlight. The ways one can grow to fill a space without spreading thin. The real reason noble families have bushels of bright, loud children. Not just to fill a space. Not to have options or to peacock their position. But because joy builds a person up, and it is so easily spread when one finally finds the safety, the peace to feel it. And that joy, that safety, that sureness in what is and what could be, it creates life. What else could it possibly do?

Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the Third is a husband, a father of five, and a Lord of Whitestone. His family is safe, and it is flourishing. He is happy. He has reclaimed the places left to spiders and ghosts and learned how to live in those once haunted rooms. He finds, despite all the odds, a home. And his own right to be in it.


End file.
